Vote & Decide What's Next for the SEOmoz Web App?&nbsp

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

The team at SEOmoz has been hard at work this week, smoothing out a lot of the initial bumps we've seen with our beta launch of the new web app. We anticipated the app would be popular, but I don't think any of us were prepared for just how many keywords needed rank checking/grading and pages needed crawling/error-checking. Our queue to fetch rankings/crawl URLs had a backup of multiple tens of thousands of requests all week, and the dev team's been slogging away on parallelization, separation of queing stages and other fixes.

Our next big release is scheduled for August 25 (possibly the 26th depending on how repairs go) and we're all crazy excited (and more than a little nervous, sleep deprived and caffeinated). Feel free to start marking your calendars; I know we have :-)

But, today, I'm here to talk about (and ask about ) the future of the web app. We've got a nearly endless list of features & functionality we're hoping to add to the web app in the weeks and months to come, and we need your help in priotizing what YOU care about. To start, I'll share two lists - the first is our "quick hit" list of items we're planning to address in the next 2-3 weeks (some will even be in time for our "big" launch on August 25th). The second is some larger concepts we've been noodling around with that may take a few months to get in. With both, we're hoping you'll give your $0.02 and help us prioritize which items to concentrate on.

Quick Hits List

#1 - Printable Reports (DOC & PDF)

We've heard from a lot of users already that they'd like the ability to export the crawl diagnostic reports, on-page summaries and report cards and ranking data into DOC or PDF files to be integrated into internal or client reporting. Luckily, this is a feature that's early on our roadmap, possibly as soon as September.

#2 - On-Page Optimization Interface Tweaks

The on-page analysis section has already garnered a lot of kind words and hopefully helped many of you improve your targeting for some easy rankings wins. However, there's a few tweaks that folks have suggested to help make it more usable, including removing the "fix" level of difficulty label on elements that are already completed and offering a way to re-order the recommendations to show those that are incomplete at the top.

We're also working on ways, in the longer term, to help make this page shorter and the information more quickly digestable. Look for some interface experiments coming soon.

#3 - Adding Issues to Crawl Diagnostics

We currently track 20 unique crawl issues (split between errors, warnings and notices). Some other items we've considered tracking include:

If you have additional items you'd like to see in the crawl diagnostics, please let us know!

#4 -"Ignorable" Crawl Issues

Some of our members have noted that they'd like to be able to "ignore" an issue and have it exist only in an "archived" issues section. We think this is a great idea, as there can be times when we catch a 404, duplicate content, robots blocking, etc. and it's not a problem for your site but an intentional move. When this happens, it can be frustrating to see the continued error/warning message, so an archiving system might be ideal.

We're still working on the concept of how to implement, but an "ingore all issues of this type" and a specific "ignore this issue for this URL" are currently on the roster.

#5 - Bulk Keyword Import System

Today, it can be a bit frustrating to add more than 5-10 keywords and labels at a time. We'd like to build a system that lets you upload a CSV or paste in rows with lable data included in a consistent format to make bulk insertion and labeling easier.

Big Ideas for the Future

Although we've amassed literally hundreds of ideas for upgrading and adding to the web app's featureset, we're really excited about a few key ones that have many mini-features inside. These include:

A) Integration with Google Analytics

One of the projects we're most excited about is integrating with Google Analytics (and later, other packages like Webtrends and Omniture). You can see some of our early ideas below in wireframe format (these ARE NOT finished designs by any means, just illustrations I made in Flash).

We're keen on the idea of having some stacked are graphs to help you see when traffic from different sources vary, and help to measure indexation via the chart below. Splitting out social traffic by using a set of referrers (ReadWriteWeb does a good breakdown of sources) to filter also struck us as being a great feature.

From there, we're also bullish on including data about specific keywords alongside rankings, keyword difficulty scores and estimates from Google AdWords:

With this data, we think we can calculate some cool metrics around the potential opportunity of a given keyword, though this will, obviously, require some testing and refinement.

B) Crawl Depth Analysis

We've long wanted a way to visualize a site's internal link structure and know how depth of pages from the homepage might actually be influencing crawling, rankings and traffic. With the custom crawl & crawl diagnostics system, we believe we can architect this into the web app's dataset (though it's unfortunately non-trivial to do so). You can see a very early wireframe below:

This is one of our more ambitious projects, but we'd love your thoughts about whether it would be valuable/useful for your campaigns.

C) XML Sitemaps Builder

Building an XML Sitemap can be a pain, even with some of the specialized software out there (though we at SEOmoz are big fans of John Mueller's GSiteCrawler). Since the web app is already crawling your site's pages, it only makes sense that we could construct an XML sitemap, plug into Google Webmaster Tools' API and help you verify the sitemap and make custom tweaks based on what you want to include or exclude.

D) Keyword Research System

A relatively obvious next step would be the addition of a keyword research tool. We'd like integrate the functionality of the keyword difficulty tool's analysis along with data from Google's AdWords API. This might help you choose which keywords are most likely to produce value for your site and deserve some content/targeting in SEO.

E) Historical Link Analysis

One feature we hear demand for all the time is historical link information. We've actually got the data already stored from previous indices, but in testing retrieval, we've found that numbers can really bounce around due to the massive amount of noise in the "not-so-awesome" parts of the web (spammy sites, scrapers, etc). Thus, we're looking into ways to scrub the data a bit before building this system (possibly by using our metrics to have the option of showing only mozRank 2-3+ pages that link, which tend to be relatively high quality). This work may take us into November or later, but we've got our fingers crossed that it can be in the web app by year's end.

The wireframes above are just some initial concepts. We'd also really like to be able to show you pages/sites that were linking to you in a previous index but aren't any longer or those that are newly linking, too.

F) Social Media / Link Monitoring System

Finally, we've got a project to turn some of the early work from Blogscape and our Social Media Monitoring prototype into a more robust, fully functional system. Our goal here is to provide a list of all the pages, tweets, blog posts and links that your site acquires in a more real-time type environment. So many of us are constantly doing Google Blog searches and Twitter searches and looking at our referrers via analytics that we thought it would be great to combine all that data in a single repository so you can keep up to date on what the web is saying about you (and, more relevantly, how important each of those sources are).

We're still at the nascent beginnings of this work, but hope to have some wireframes to show in the not-too-far-out future - possibly in the next feedback request post.

Just for fun, I thought I'd include a poll regarding these "big" ideas and see which you're most excited about:

With our next big launch just 9 days away (yikes!), we're all working hard to make the web app and the many other pieces that are releasing better, faster and more stable. However, we'd love your opinions and will certainly use that feedback to improve, if not next week then in the future.

Also - as we move forward, we've decided to be more open about our product development and roadmap (as part of our commitment to being TAGFEE), so you can expect a post every few weeks or so detailing some of our ideas and asking for your thoughts on what to build next and how to improve.

p.s. If you haven't tried the web app beta yet, give it a spin - it's PRO-only, and some sections are a little slow, but by building a campaign now, you'll have more historical data and trends to compare over time as the app improves.

For me, I'm most keen on historical link data. I think that's a killer feature missing from linkscape.

I'm also interested to see search engine accessibility tools developed, particularly crawl depth and architecture visualization, because those tools don't really exist in the seo industry in any meaningful way.

A quick XML sitemap generator would be cool, but way cooler would be a helping hand with dupe page content and orphaned page detection perhaps using webmaster tools and or sitemap XML files as a seed source.

From the business perspective having the "campaign" framework is obviously the way to go. It hooks clients into the system and helps promote an active, positive relationship. This is good for SEOmoz and it's good for us, the Pro members. You can't beat scalable, recurring billing.

Since I see SEOmoz on this course, I almost don't care how you optimize the web app or which order. As I see it there's lots of community participation to help drive this and I'm happy to see it.

Now, my feature road map preference is purely selfish. My headaches are not around data collection or interpretation. I want SEOmoz to help me deliver the information. Either make the report layouts screenshot friendly or the visual data exports manageable. Of course the csv version of all data is necessary too.

Give me the most business friendly way to share the data, the images and the textual descriptions and I'll blend it into my own framework and foundation documents. That's what I'm looking for. Help me pass the most valuable, relevant information in chunks that the human mind would enjoy and in ways that empower my clients.

Glad to help with feedback... even though you put quite hard having to choose just one thing.

I voted for the integration of the Keyword Difficulty Tool, but I would have vote also for the historical link analysis or the crawl depth analysis.

About the Crawl Diagnostic, as far as they are still there as issue, it would be nice to see detected classical problems like Frames or Noscript presence. This one could be helpful to check out possible hidden texts (you don't know how much garbage I've found as legacy of so called SEOs).

The integration with Google Analytics is surely great. Just a suggestion: many of us run also Adwords... and Adwords is naturally linked to GA. On a middle/long term would be possible to integrate it also via API with the web apps?

Finally, as Mike wrote here above, everything that can help us export the report also in its great graphic interface will be great. But in my case I've to deal also with the problem of the language, as my market is not english based (italian and spanish) and to present a hiper cool report in english would simple make nonsense: therefore the ideal would be somehow a .docx exportation of the report in order to permit me (and other in my situation) to translate it... Well, another solution could be possible, to translate directly the interface of the web app (and you know you can count on me if needed).

That's right, not everyone speaks English. With so many of my clients in Europe and Australia it would be terrific to allow for multiple languages. Both from a layout perspective (different languages have unique spacing requirements) and from a translation point of view when words are embedded on a graph.

Plugging translated information back into the reports for printing and don't forget key data points back into form fields so the chart can pick them up.

Wow ... some big implications here. Modified campaigns would then need to be saved.

Since I'm reading Predictably Irrational, a book Rand has mentioned, I feel subtle psychological forces at work here. By asking which feature we want first, the new functions are framed within the context of both scarcity and relativity. Scarcity makes me want what I can't have, and relativity makes me covet some of these feature at a super-high level.

Psychology or not, I can't wait for these cool new features and I'm willing to pay any price to get them. (oh wait, they're already included in my Pro membership. Suckers!)

With regards to a keyword research system and also integration with GA, I would really like to see both, and I have an idea about how I would like it to look.

It would be good to have a screen that summarizes all of the available data about a single URL. It should show at least the following: which keywords the page is optimized for, the grade for each keyword, the rank for each keyword, the traffic stats for each keyword (both the Adwords traffic estimates and actual traffic numbers from GA) and a links analysis for that URL. It should also have an interface for brainstorming new keywords for that URL, incorporating keyword difficulty and on-page optimization grading to determine which new keywords might be viable targets.

Having all of this data in one place for each URL would help a lot. One problem I'm having with using the on-page optimization grader is that I'll notice that a page scores low for one particular version of its keywords, optimize for that, then realize that my changes make it score lower for another version of its keywords, and have to re-optimize the page again.

Having all of the data for one URL in one place would make it easier to prioritize - I might want an "A" for one keyword because it has a lot of traffic, and be willing to accept a "C" for some other keyword because the difficulty is very easy, etc.

Added: in actual practice, SEO generally takes place on a page-by-page basis, not on a keyword-by-keyword basis. You look at a page, and you try to decide how it should be optimized - which keywords, what order of priority, what should I do with internal links to this page, etc. With all data for one URL in one place, the work process would be much smoother. You look at a page on your site. You look at the analysis for that page, and decide what needs to be changed. You edit the page. You go on to the next page.

As it is now, to optimize a single page you have to look at several different sources of data, switch back and forth between grading, difficulty and ranking screens for several different keywords etc.

Amen! I see the Analytics/Keywords ideas tied together, and the most valuable feature on the list. The "Top Keywords Sending Traffic" view with Ranking, # of Visits, and On-Page Grade on one page is beautiful.

I haven't used the app ($79/month is ridiculous for a pro account) so I don't know if this already exists... but I would love to see HTML/CSS validation across all pages. That would be great to flag up potential layout and cross-browser issue.It would be great as well is there was a free or low-cost version that allowed you to get data for some pages.

Really? Using the SEOmoz tools earn you more than $79 per month (or 99 at normal price) compared to not using it? I find that very hard to believe (and don't get me started on the $499 and $2,000 plans, what a joke).

I pay less than that for my dedicated server. I'm not a cheapskate or anything, I pay for things that are definitely and obviously worth it (like Basecamp). If there was a version for 5 or 10 bucks, that gave you maybe 30 keywords tracked and 2,000 pages plus the other pro tools, I would seriously consider it.

It's great to see a dissenting opinion here svivian. It makes for a more balanced dialogue.

I personally don't agree with your valuation of PRO membership. For me, time is money. Could I get most of the functionality that the PRO tools give me elsewhere? Yes. For free? Probably mostly. But at what cost?

If I can squeeze in one more client to my busy schedule, then that more than pays for my PRO membership. It pays me more money.

Using the SEOmoz tools and now their awesome new app, utilizing their Q&A, attending the webinars, etc. they all help me do what I do better. And faster. And better and faster make me more money.

I know you understand that because you pay for Basecamp. I'm sure you do it because you see the value in it.

Thanks for the reply. I understand the time factor but I don't see the tools saving huge amounts of time. (Particularly for the Pro Premier account - for $2k/month you could hire someone to do all that and more.)

If PRO works for you then that's great. It's unlikely I'd use it enough (actually a few hours usage would be more time than I currently spend) - but at $79/mo I'm never going to find out.

A plan with a much lower entry barrier would be awesome IMO. Just a suggestion for the seomoz guys :)

It is really hard to chose between all the cool future updates. I believe keyword research system and historical link analysis are most critical to us. I have been a big fan of this software however not having to look at historical ranking and link value is my biggest pain point.

To overcome this, we take screen shots of the top moz metrics and refer back to compare results of our current link campaigns and site performance.

I'd like to see RankTracker graphs showing ranking improvement over time! I've yet to find a tool that shows historic ranking data in graph form rather than just comparing it to the position last day/week/month.

It's not the most important metric, not by a long shot, but it's something customers always inevitably put at least some focus on...

Still surprised to see my comment about removing the "fix" element there. Whatever the team decides to focus on we will continue to offer suggestions, thats what makes this community so fun to be a part of.

Awesome to see some of the very features we were much in need of at our agency being integrated in the web app right... now.

I voted for the keyword research system, any chance this would become available this year?

Slightly off topic: does anyone know of a good online tool that enables to generate / manage keywords from the Adwords database? We've used Nichebot before but we are getting very strange results lately, seems to miss lots of the short tail keywords. Wordtracker and KD won't do since we need Dutch keywords. Of course, we would switch over to SEOmoz' keyword tool as soon as it goes live ;)

This post makes me soooo happy to be a Pro member! At this rate, SEOmoz will continue to add more value for SEM consultants than dozens of other software/education resources I used to pay for, combined. Thanks guys...can't wait to see these features come to fruition.

1. Historical Link Analyis but I would love to be able to download/view all new links obtained by competior X in say August 2010.

2. Competitor movement for super important keyword X lets say the industry that I am concerned about has 5 super important keywords. On these keywords I maintain position 1. What would be of interest to me is all competitor movement in the top 19 positions. If I see a competitor move from position 20 to postion 5 in a very short period of time, that would make me think it would be a good time to further optimize my position on that keyword.

3.Historial Anchor text changes. I would to know the type of anchor text my competitor is getting over a period of time. This way I know what they are optimizing for.

3. SERP Performance *new* it would breat to integrate Google Adwords Tool data + Analytics for the Top Non-Branded keywords. Based on the historical ranking position and click-thru estimate, determine the keyword gap, current vs potential

I think SERP Performance should be given the most weight. Because as we know, an "un-opitmized" page can still perform well. Techincalshould be given the 2nd most weight, IMO

For B) Crawl Depth Analysis - this is great info and something I've wanted for awhile, but it is only useful if it goes beyond your bot's crawling. Such as:

1) Analyzing site logs to see how many of those URLs Google and Bing crawled.
2) Analyzing search engine results to see how many of those URLs are actually indexed
3) Combining with Analytics to determine, "pages 4 clicks away brought in 2,000 visitors from 1,500 keywords", "pages 3 clicks away brought in 4,000 visitors from these 1,400 keywords", etc.

If, in your example, it is only how many URLs your bot has seen vs. crawled, that's not incredibly useful information (even though your bot crawls similarly to the search engines).

Totally agree - we'd try to show this information in context, so you could see whether deeper pages are earning more/less traffic, targeting more difficult keywords, having more crawl issues, etc. It would be an additional data point to add to the list wherever useful.

I would like to see a tool that alerts you to when a double listing in Google is possible. We all know how valuable a double listing is and how easy they are to achieve once you have the first page ranking well.

Considering all the options i'd rather have something that I can't find elsewhere. Historical link data is rather difficult, but I think SEOmoz already has some great filters to clean out crappy links. I don't know of any other service on the web that offers historical link analysis (feel free to correct me).

XML Sitemaps are easy to make, Google Analytics data would be convenient but I can always get it directly from GA, keyword research with the keyword difficulty / Adwords combo, and social media monitoring is already accessible / plentiful. Integration is not so important for me but I'm not against it :)

I guess I'm more for seeing something new rather than having a convenience feature. So historical link data and crawl depth are at the top of my wish list. Integration with other existing services is great for saving time but a truly unique feature would stand out and be much more helpful for site audits and SEO strategy.

All of these ideas are great. Left my vote for historical link analysis though analytics and crawl depth would be tied for second place for me.

Another thing I'd love to see (we've built one in-house but would be great for this too) would be a reputation tracking function. Snap shot of the top 20 or 50 results for brand name, taggable with "good, bad, neutral" and show changes over time.

Integrating with Google Analytics would be awesome. The Crawl Depth Analysis looks really cool to me too, I'm sure there are probably pages that I think are internally linked the way I want them to be but aren't (just hopefully not too many...).

In the short term (although this kind of overlaps with the integrating Analytics/AdWords plan) I would love to see the monthly Google AdWords Exact Match traffic numbers next to the ranking. I'm glad that the app links to the Keyword Difficulty tool when displaying each keyword, but it would be even more convenient to see that data without having to click away.

Having this app come out has rejuvenated my interest in keyword research strategies, and it's awesome to not have to "prioritize" as much in selecting keywords to track - 250 versus 100 means I can use my imagination. We picked up Market Samurai so we could track more keywords in more ways, but new SEOMoz app has meant I haven't opened it up nearly as often as I did before. Very cool.